Media Industry Archive

There are very few analysts covering the newspaper business any longer. What’s to analyze? Once a patient is on life-support, the role for a doctor in diagnosing and treating him has ended. Care-takers can handle the rest. Last year, the most authoritative newsletter covering the American newspaper industry — The Morton-Groves Newspaper Newsletter — decided to cease...

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YouTube as a money-maker? Read on. First, let’s establish some context. Anyone trying to build a content business on the web is (or should be) aware of a set of irksome contradictions: Creating lots of truly original content is prohibitively expensive. Aggregating content is easy, but establishing your value-add is hard. User-generated content (UGC), though inconsistent in quality, is...

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For decades, some of the biggest celebrities in U.S. cities have been newspaper columnists. Herb Caen, for example, embodied San Francisco, or at least his slice of it,  in a way that no one since he died in the late ’90s has been able to replicate. In most cities, there still are a cluster of columnists whose voices rise above the crowd, but they are a dying breed. In Chicago, over the...

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Yesterday we took the long view on Internet advertising; today’s let’s zoom in on one company: The New York Times. The way trend lines are crossing in the media business from print to online these days are illustrated by just one month’s figures for this one publishing company. July 2008: Total company revenues decreased 10.1 percent compared with July last year; overall ...

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One of the few constants over the past decade in the digital media industry is that online advertising in the U.S. just keeps growing quarter after quarter. From the time numbers started being tracked in earnest, in Q-1 1997, online advertising grew  for 14 straight quarters before stalling, and then falling for about two years as the Web 1.0 bubble burst. Once, the upturn returned, in Q-4...

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One more bit of gloomy newspaper news — the nation’s largest chain, Gannett, released its July earnings.  Ad revenue was off 16.7 percent; classified ads fell 25.2 percent; and real estate ad revenue tumbled 37.9 percent. *** In the battle to go mobile via iPhone, LinkedIn released its app this week, joining Facebook, which promises an upgrade next month. Building a decent app for...

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We’ve made much of the “time on site” (TOS) metric here as one of the best indicators of how well a media site is serving its users. The latest Nielsen Online figures suggest a mixed record for the nation’s largest newspaper sites in terms of TOS. The New York Times is up four minutes and 42 seconds since July ‘07 and leads all  newspapers sites with a TOS of 32...

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Succession continues to be a big issue for News Corp. and its aging CEO Rupert Murdoch, so it’s more than a little surprising to learn that Murdoch deputy Peter Chernin has negotiated himself a sweet deal in case he isn’t offered the top job — or even if he does. Over at BNET’s 10-Q Detective blog,  David Phillips and Debra Fiakis found that Chernin’s contract...

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More or less for fun, I decided to compare July’s top ten online news sites in the U.S. by traffic with their parent companies’ estimated market caps. The results are revealing. Company               Uniques (millions)         Mkt Cap (billions) MSNBC                            37.5                           ...

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Yesterday’s post about Digg led a number of readers to ask me about other social bookmarking sites.  Are they just as likely to be controlled by an elite group of power users as is the case at Digg, or do they provide a more “honest” opportunity for user-supported content to rise to the top? Of course, I’m not privy to the algorithms used by Digg, nor the dozens of...

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